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Saturday, July 28, 2012

Blogher 12 - Sorority bidding for party invites

One in a series of posts about Blogher 12 in New York City
After my rant about Twitter-stalking for party invites, several of my blogger friends pointed out I venting and not offering a solution. How unlike me! Normally you have to bind and gag me to keep me from telling you how I would solve your problem.

It seems from the outside that the same 200 bloggers are at all the "exclusive" parties and the other 2800 are not. The popular bloggers will be party-hopping, zig-zagging across midtown Manhattan to grab their swag, and run to the next event . There are so many parties they don't have time to attend sessions, or even stay to the end of the event they are attending. And there is a massive amount of no-shows when something better comes along.

How about a party bidding system like a sorority rush? Sponsors would identify bloggers of interest based on a profile provided by the Blogher. Bloggers would identify parties/events of interest from a list provided by Blogher. Sponsors would find out about bloggers they may have not known about who are interested in them, and bloggers find out about parties and products they may not know about. Bloggers would have to indicate their top choices, and so would the sponsors

Or maybe a party auction? You have 100 party points. You could spread them out, and put all 100 on one party. Sponsors know how much you value them based on how much you bid. Sponsors could compete to get people to bid on their parties. If you are out of points, you must give up a party bid to re-bid your points.

Maybe separate the brand bloggers to several pre-conference days, like the Health minder and Path-finder conferences? That way invite-only parties don't detract from the official Blogher events.

Of course Blogher has no control over the invite-only. Maybe by offering information about the bloggers, they can encourage the sponsors to look at a wider range of bloggers, and buy into this system.